In this study a model of question answering (called QUEST) is tested in the context of short stories. College students first read a story and then judged the quality of answers to questions about episodes in the story. The model could account for the goodness-of-answer judgments and decision latencies of 5 categories of questions: why, how, when, enablement, and consequence. QUEST specifies the information sources that are activated during question answering; the content of each information source is structured according to a theory of knowledge representation. QUEST specifies the convergence processes that dramatically narrow down the set of possible answers (activated from the information sources) to a small set of good answers to a question.

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This study presents evidence that a prototype touch interface technology emulating basic interaction techniques of a mouse pointing device is comparable in overall usability to a conventional mousc? for a direct manipulation, graphical windowing software environment. The touch technology prototype involves using either a stylus or finger, with an overlay sensitive to changes in capacitance. Users practiced each technique (mouse,' stylus, finger, keyboard with no mouse), in the context of carrying out office-related tasks on the first of a two day study, and then eight similar test tasks on the second day, in a completely within-subject design. Significant effects for time on task were found for Techniques and Tasks for five practice tasks on the second day of the study. The clearest significant effect was that the stylus technique was faster than the keyboard. A qualitative analysis of errors indicates that there were problems with the precision of pointing using the finger, and to a lesser extent the stylus and mouse. User comments and ratings indicate that the stylus and mouse were preferred comparably, and were preferred to the finger and keyboard techniques.